Alternative Stories
37 episodes listed below
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Independent Welsh publisher Seren interviews some of the UK’s best poets (who also happen to be published by Seren) about their creative practice, inspiration and recently published books. Listen below or find us on your favourite podcast platform. Find out more about Seren at https://www.serenbooks.com/.
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Poem readings and exacting interviews reveal how Seren poets turn formal choices, lived experience and persistent images into collections.
The Seren Poetry Podcast gives one poet and one collection room to breathe. Rhian Edwards moves between poem readings and precise questions about the choices beneath them.
A poem framed as an equation gives Rhian Edwards a question you might have been afraid to ask.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A thoughtful poetry interview where process, place, and Welsh identity stay closely tied.
Nerys Williams's Republic stays close to west Wales, where class, culture, community, and bilingual identity all shape the conversation. It traces the making of the collection with care, moving through post-punk memory, devolution-era change in Wales, and the discipline of…
A calm conversation about loss, form, and the blank page.
Glyn Edwards brings In Orbit into view as work shaped by loss without being boxed in by it. The episode stays close to form: traditional stanzas, prose poems, shape poems, and the shift from teen years to the present, when Edwards is teaching.
A direct, humane poetry conversation with wit, bite, and hard-won self-recognition.
The episode handles Jewish and lesbian identity, migrant heritage, domestic violence, prejudice, and ageing with plain confidence. Girl Golem gives the conversation a sharp frame, and the poems keep the pressure on without losing clarity.
A reflective poetry conversation where climate, myth, and the body meet careful craft.
Goliath follows Rhiannon Hewson’s collection from the Barents Sea and a Russian oil field into questions of body, mythology, the more-than-human, and the private histories of women.
A candid poetry discussion that links domestic life, memory, and loss to wit and feeling.
Vanessa Lampert's Say It With Me is presented as a debut poetry collection shaped by domestic life, memory, family, parenthood, loss, and the body, and the episode gives those ideas a clear and humane frame.
A patient poetry conversation where mathematics, animals, and hidden feeling meet.
Judy Brown's Lairs is a conversation about poems that hold contradiction open: shelter and secrecy, animal instinct and mathematical order, precision and drift.
Great books, taken chapter by chapter, with delight
Book talk with room to wander.
Vanessa Lampert brings her debut collection close to the mic.
Difference is the question the episode keeps returning to.
Judy Brown sits with the idea of the lair.
Goliath starts in dark water.
Grief stays close.
Republic begins in West Wales, with language close by.